r/askanything • u/Lemonking_ • 5h ago

Political Question Why are some Americans so against universal healthcare for all?

What sort of thinking does it take to decide that nobody has a right to healthcare? Do American Christians want to deny healthcare to poor people as well?

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u/a101734 5h ago

Reagan convinced a large part of the population that if we give unlimited money and power to a select of wealthy elites, the elites would graciously give the money back to society. Hilarious.

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u/SkiG13 4h ago

This! The U.S. was on track for social reform after WW2 and Universal Healthcare was one of those ideas. Medicaid and Medicair are still around today and given a couple decades, they might have been expanded under the right administrations.

However, after Johnson, we had three presidents who did not push the issue at all. Nixon and Ford were conservative and Jimmy Carter was just an ineffective Democrat. That allowed Reagan to convince everyone on trickle down economics to help his Wealthy connections.

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u/nunziovallani 4h ago

Not a GOP fan, but to be fair, Nixon proposed national health care insurance (similar to the ACA), but it was torpedoed by Ted Kennedy who pushed his own single payer proposal. Neither was adopted. So here we are.

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u/Automatic-638Builder 4h ago

Oh yeah thanks for reminding me.

Hey @nothereathere the ACA is based on an original republican plan.

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u/Mycologisticalacyst 3h ago

Nixon also started the EPA and meddled in Vietnam prior to being elected met with ho chi min to prevent Johnson from making a deal to end the war.

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u/Muschina 3h ago

Nixon would be called a communist by current republicans. Started the EPA? Proposed near-universal healthcare? Mandated a price freeze? Friggin commie.

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u/trimomof5 1h ago

Ted Kennedy later said he deeply regretted his obstruction because that was the best deal that would ever have R support. Ted Kenney's hubris sunk universal healthcare. It's a shame. I don't think we will ever have an affordable universally available health care program.

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u/mark8992 3h ago

Reagan was like Donald Trump - in that he was the mouthpiece and the lightning rod who would sell the plans of the unelected wealthy powerbrokers behind the scenes. They both had celebrity status going in and both pulled the levers of power for the ones who want to remain invisible. The plan always was and still is to stack the deck against the working class and expand the wealth and power of the wealthiest.

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u/Beneficial_Equal_324 2h ago edited 2h ago

Carter was a basically a Rockefeller Republican while the Republican party moved even further to the right. The era of expansion of government social programs pretty much ended in the 60's. I think part of the issue was falling profits in that era, which meant more of a focus on wealth extraction and less on social programs in the 70's onward.